Amazon's recent release of DynamoDB, a database whose name is inspired by Dynamo, the key-value database the distributed datastore they've been running in production for a good five to six years now. I think it's great they've finally done it, though from my obverservations, there's little resemblance of what the original Dynamo paper describes, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Traditionally Amazon hasn't been very open about how they implement their services, so some of what I'm stating here may be nothing more than an educated guess. Either way, the result is pretty neat.

Time to take a good look at what it has to offer, how that works out in code, and to make some wild guesses as to what's happening under the covers. I'm using fog's master to talk to DynamoDB in the examples below, but the official Ruby SDK also works. Fog is closer to the bare API metal though, which works out well for our purposes.